A few years ago, the far right Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn write a book called To Hell In A Handcart. Amazon describes it as follows: “Mickey French is just an ordinary bloke, an ex-cop struggling to look after his family as self-righteous do-gooders and bungling bureaucrats bring the country to its knees.” You’ve got the idea, then. It goes on to decry immigrants, political incorrectness and the entire premise is that of a man, the aforementioned Mickey French, who is accused of murder after shooting a burglar in his own home, a fictional version of Tony Martin. And the punchline is that Britain is going to hell in a handcart. I agree that Britain appears to be going to hell in a handcart, but not for the reasons Littlejohn gives.
Today, a young woman, Jo Cox, was murdered. Ms Cox was an MP, serving the area in which she was born. She was married, she had two children. She had campaigned all her life to make the world a better place and today her work ended. Worse than that, there is a new widower in the world, there are two children who no longer have a mother.
MPs are not greatly loved. They are seen as self-serving, often freeloading shysters, except that when you actually meet them, this is not always the case. They do themselves few favours at times but I am convinced, always have been, that most politicians, of all shades are in politics for the right reasons, which is to make people’s lives better. Jo Cox was only elected last May so she had not been in politics for long, but already she and made a substantial impression on parliament. Whatever you feel about her politics, nothing can justify what happened today. We can speculate about her killer – there are already suggestions that he was a member of far right organisations, but we don’t know that – but it won’t bring her back.
The murder of an MP really is an attack on all of us. Our cynicism of her profession should not cloud the greater threat to everything we believe in. A democracy, with all its flaws, is at the very heart of everything we stand for. Ms Cox was the first sitting member of parliament to be murdered since Ian Gow was killed by the IRA in 1990. She was Labour, he was Tory; it really doesn’t matter which party they belonged to.
Rightly, campaigning on the EU referendum has been temporarily suspended and not before time. The hell in a handcart today was accelerated by the sight of the real architect of Brexit, a smirking Nigel Farage standing in front of a poster of thousands of displaced brown-coloured people (this was not an accident) which was eerily reminiscent of a pre World War Two nazi poster from the 1930s. No one is seriously comparing Farage to Adolf Hitler but equally no one can believe that the image he was presenting was just a coincidence. My parents and grandparents who lived through and fought during that war would have turned in their graves to see a mainstream political leader in this country, Great Britain, recreating such a terrible image.
And then, we hear that a minority – repeat, minority – of England fans on tour in France were singing derogatory songs about refugee children. What the hell is going on?
There is so much venom, so much hate. From odious self-publicists like Katie Hopkins, Littlejohn and Kelvin MacKenzie to politicians like Farage, George Galloway, Nick Griffin (wait until you have seen HIS tweets about the murder of Joe Cox) and Boris Johnson. We live in a country in which we are repeatedly told that everything is broken and nothing works, that we are being swamped by foreign thieves and rapists, that our culture is being taken away from us by a sinister elite. The press do not possess the power they once did, but their pernicious, corrosive agenda doesn’t educate or inform. Instead it takes the truth, chews it up and spits it out.
Is there any chance that this awful, hateful murder can make us sit up and think about how we are behaving? Here is someone who was campaigning to make the world a better place taken from he family by someone who wanted to make it worse? Don’t take away the cut and thrust, don’t remove debate and argument because without it we become North Korea. I don’t come out of this smelling entirely of roses either, having involved myself in things I probably shouldn’t have done, engaged in slanging matches that would better have been avoided. In the cold light of day I’m trying to reflect on that too.
It’s the shock of someone like Jo Cox being murdered that gets you to thinking. It was senseless, it was callous, it was cruel, it has ripped the heart out of a family and it has ripped the heart out of the community. With any luck, it may just get the rest of the country – including people like me, who can be too quick to shoot their mouths off – to think again.
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” said John Lennon in Imagine. “I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.” Murdering a young MP, invoking memories of Nazi Germany and vilifying refugees suggests we are not quite there yet.
If anything positive can come out of this shocking incident, I hope John Lennon’s words can come true. I’m afraid we really could be on our way to hell in a handcart if they don’t.
